When you submit your hard worked on blog entry to a social networking site, you are hoping that you will see some traffic to your site and people who are interested in reading what you have to say. As an experiment, we set up a geek e-zine, heavily instrumented it, and then published every article on Digg, Reddit, Netscape, and Stumbled upon, as well as integrating it into Technorati to see what kind of traffic would be generated by this kind of process. Overview Since April 11th when we started our experiment, overall we saw 8,333 visits in total to the site. Of that, 11.34% was direct traffic, people who had book marked, or used any one of the links via blogroll or reference in other articles. Nearly 81% came from the social book marking sites, while 7.7% came via search engines. We are actually surprised that search engines showed up on this, as that was not a major focus of the project. The "Digg Effect" By Far Digg was the best place to post, but the traffic was choppy, with less than ½ of a minute spent on the site actually looking at the article. This was not even enough time to register an advertising hit, let alone have anyone reading the actual article. While the hits were good being 45% of all traffic to the site, the quality of that traffic was poor. As well, the bounce rate was 88.3% in that people just spent 28 seconds on the page and did not do anything else on the web site. Overall, though the bounce rate was just a bit above the site average of 82.6% The other interesting bit about Digg was that it started strong, and then over the next 45 days tapered down to few hits, other traffic sources became more important than Digg, although the context and content of the blog stayed the same. Most stories were buried or marked as Spam, duplicate or inaccurate as they changed their algorithm during the test. Stumbled Upon By Far the best social book-marking site of the lot in terms of user behavior and time spent on site, stumbled upon was a good one to look at. Most spent more than a minute on the site, while still not enough time to read the article, it had the lowest bounce rate and the longest time on site of all the social book-marking sites. The problem that appeared with Stumbled upon is that after 20 blog entries, stumbled upon started timing out and not taking the entry. We tried with one account to submit and the submission kept on failing. We tried with another account, and the submission took. We think that somewhere in the system that single blog posters will have to use discretion with this one, because it looks like there is a limit somewhere in the system that only allows a per person per site limit on entries. This is why the referral graph below is so choppy, after a while stumbled upon just stopped taking the blog entries. Stumbled upon was just 5.36% of traffic to the site. Technorati Overall ok, but did not generate a lot of traffic, more of a steady state process over time. People searching for stuff and finding the blog generated the most hits. We tried three WTF (Where's the fire) as well to see if that would do anything to increase traffic to the site, and it did not. Technorati was 4.2% of traffic to the site, while not bad, it was the median for everything in terms of bounce rate, but at least the readers stayed around for 44 seconds, still barely enough time to read the article if the person is a speed reader. Reddit Reddit was probably the most interesting of the sites, and we are wondering if we got tripped up somewhere in their system as a splog. We started strong on the first day, but after that, no additional articles ever showed up on the new page at all. They showed up in our personal bookmark on the reddit site so we know they are in the system, but searching will not reference them, and the only place they show up is in our own bookmark area. By far the worst time on site with 16 seconds and a phenomenal bounce rate of 97% with less than 1% of our traffic coming from this site. NOTE: We think that something happened on Reddit that buried the entire account, we do not know what it is, and we have a doubt about this data return from reddit. We did not try alternative accounts for this system, and after May 14th we essentially lost interest and stopped posting articles unless we thought they were really cool. Netscape Netscape was the last in the test, and the worst performer in terms of generating traffic, with 17 seconds on site and our average bounce rate. As we closed out the experiment Netscape actually started showing some traction, we were building out our rep, had made some friends, and were being involved in the community. As we built out our accounts reputation, we stared seeing better results. Netscape accounted for less than 1% of all traffic to the site, and the users did not spend any time on site that was meaningful. The most interesting part about this was that during this time two blog entries went viral on us, one for the Apple IGasm that went from MySpace to the Seattle PI Football forums that generated about 5% of total traffic for the time period. And another that went from e-mail to a car forum for the Astroglide Data Breach that also generated about 5% of total traffic. While not directly part of the experiment, 10% of total site traffic for the entire experiment came from those two viral processes. The influence of a viral word of mouth process to increase site traffic fit in with the amount of traffic seen by the social book marking sites as a viable process to get traffic to your web site. Notes on Data Gathering: Data presented is from Google analytics, the experiment ran from 11 April to 31 May 2007. The experiment consisted of a single blog that used the social book marking sites Reddit, Digg, Netscape, Stumbled Upon, and Technorati. The usual disclaimers apply, in that this is a single view, might not be suitable for others, and with all statistics, your mileage may vary.

"If this information for these sites is gathered using HTTP_REFERER, you're not getting information about visits from people using the Safari browser, or people like me who have turned this value off in ZoneAlarm.

Also, I have enough sites to visit through email newsletters and blog links that I have never used any of those sites.
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